Business of Software Blog

How to get a speaking slot at a conference

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Over the past three years I’ve received hundreds of e-mails from people who want to speak at the Business of Software conference I run with Joel Spolsky.

Over time, I’ve reached conclusions about the best ways to get a speaking slot, at this or any other conference. Here are some does and don’ts:

Do write a personal note, tailored specifically to the conference

Don’t get your PR agency / PA to write on your behalf. 'My client/boss is fabulous and important and would like to speak' is not going to get your client/boss a speaking slot.

Do stand out from the crowd. If you're running a 20 person company / have written a book / have raised $10m in funding then that’s a great achievement, but it doesn’t stand out. Tell me something unique.

Don’t just rely on your personal reputation. Unless you’re really, really famous, of course.

Don’t offer a standard stance on a broad, much-discussed topic (‘why agile software development is a good / bad thing’, for example)

Do tell me something I don’t know. Take an unusual stance on a familiar topic, or choose a narrow topic.

Do demonstrate your skills. Include a five minute youtube demo of you on top form. Surprisingly few people do this

Don’t just pitch your product / service

To illustrate, here are three examples of pitches I’ve received.

First of all, here’s a superb one from Matt Mason which follows most of the rules. My comments are in red.

From: Matt Mason [mailto:matt@thepiratesdilemma.com]
Sent: 23 August 2007 19:17
To: info@businessofsoftware.org
Subject: Speaking at Business of Software 2007

Dear Sir/Madam [minor failing – you could found out my name easily],

I'm very interested in the possibility of speaking at Business of Software 2007 - it seems there is a lot of synergy between your event and the topic of my new book. This year’s theme, back to fundamentals [good – you’ve done your research] gels very well with what I talk about - the fundamental difference between right and wrong when it comes to piracy and competition, especially in relation to the software industry [good – links to the conference topic]. My name is Matt Mason, I'm the author of The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism, which examines how piracy and some other subversive ideas are reshaping society and driving innovation. [sounds pretty cool to me]

The problem of how to respond to piracy and the challenge presented by new ways to share information and resources is one facing people everywhere, and it's an issue that commands a new perspective. I make the case that piracy is not something companies and individuals should always necessarily fight, but compete with instead. The book is a take on the economic concept known as the Prisoner's Dilemma: What is the difference between fighting pirates, competing and collaborating with them? Is piracy actually a solution to a problem that hasn't been identified correctly? Does piracy change the models of competition that capitalism has succeeded on for so long? Does it actually expose contradictions between those models and their realities? Do recent but forgotten episodes in the history of capitalism hold the answers? I use a lot of fascinating case studies, and just a little bit of game theory, to help answer these questions and assess the best path of action for corporations who are dogged by piracy now, but whose response in the immediate will affect whether or not they come out on top long-term. [you’ve really piqued my interest now]

The book is coming out in the U.S. in January through Simon & Schuster, and through Penguin in the U.K. [good - you’ve persuaded some influential people that you’ve got something worth saying] In the run up to the launch I'm speaking in both countries, doing both keynotes and breakout sessions. I have developed a lively, exciting talk which brings the concepts from the book to life, involves the listener and will generate discussion and give your audience an insight into new ways to think about how we as a society share and exchange information, as new technology and some ideas that emerged from youth culture re-draw the lines between right and wrong.

I became fascinated with piracy as a teenager, I'm an ex-pirate radio DJ originally from London (now based in New York City) and the founder of RWD Magazine (www.rwdmag.com) [you sound like someone I’d like to meet. But what’s RWD?]. RWD is one of the largest music magazines and youth brands in the UK, and one of the largest urban music websites in the world. As a writer I've been at the intersection between youth culture and innovation for many years, covering new sounds, scenes and trends for magazines in 12 countries, and I helped build a successful business that won more than a few awards [you’re a high achiever too]. As a consultant, I've worked with everyone from wily start-ups to blue chips to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown [I won’t hold this against you].

Please do let me know if this is something you'd be interested in hearing more about – I can send you a galley of the book, you can also find more information on my website.

Kind Regards,
Matt

--

Matt Mason
Author, The Pirate's Dilemma

[Nice picture]

 

Matt got a speaking slot, and was awesome.

Secondly, here’s an average e-mail. Not dire, but it just didn’t stand out. I’ve edited it to preserve anonymity.

From: XXXXX
Sent: ---------- 2007
To: Neil Davidson
Subject: Speaking at Business of Software Conference
Importance: High [To you maybe]

Hi Neil [Good – you addressed me by name],

I hope things are well with you.

I wanted to find out if you are still accepting speaking proposals for the Business of Software conference happening in San Jose, California this October. Your speaker list is quite [hmm, faint praise] impressive and I see you still have some slots available. I wanted to see if you'd be interested in a proposal from my client [oh-oh] XXXX - and their CEO, YYYYY. YYYYY is a successful entrepreneur, developer and software executive [as are thirty other people who’ve taken the trouble to write to me personally] who has spoken at high-level IT conferences, including AAAA, BBBB and CCCC. [Mildly impressive, but it still doesn’t mean he’s any good]

Looking forward to your thoughts.

Yours,

[Name removed]

Finally, be prepared to break all the rules:

From: Alexis Ohanian [that name sounds familiar]
Sent: 21 June 2008 02:02
To: info@businessofsoftware.org
Subject: pechakucha sign-up

Who I am:  Pierre Francois [wtf? Thought you were called Alexis]

What I'd like to speak about: How to start, run, and sell a web 2.0 startup

Why I should speak: Because I'm Pierre Francois http://youtube.com/watch?v=Isk88nT0sRY [wtf?]

cheers,
Alexis
--
Fact: 99% of people who submit feedback to a website are genuinely looking for help. The other 1% are crazy. http://FeedbackFail.com wants the crazy emails. [wtf?]

Alexis Ohanian
cofounder @ reddit.com [ahh, I see]
swine-defender [wtf?] @ breadpig.com [wtf?]

Alexis went on to win the pecha kucha competition.

Finally – one of my favourite Woody Allen quotes – 80% of success is showing up. The first, most important, step in speaking at a conference is to ask. The odds of success are still small, but they’re much higher than if you don’t.

[*Hat-tip to @jeffwidman for suggesting this post]

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The one, two of product marketing

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“What’s your definition of marketing?” someone asked me a few days ago. I mumbled something vague and quickly passed the question on to the next person at the table.

People get hung up on definitions, trying to understand exactly what is sales and what is marketing and where the lexical boundary between the two lies. Much better to stop defining and start doing, I think.

But what does ‘doing marketing’ involve?

For me, it’s about reaching people who need your product, and then making them want it. There are two steps there and they’re both required. If you can reach your audience, but they don’t want your product, you’re doomed. If your audience wants your product, but you can’t reach them, then you’re doomed too.

A few weeks ago I sat in on a presentation given by a Cambridge University academic. Marketing, he said, is all about building a better product. Build a product that’s five, or ten, times better than your competitors and people will bash down your door to buy it. And if that doesn’t happen? Well, in that case the trick is to make your product even more brilliant.

This academic is only thinking about the second link in the chain, and is taking the narrow view that making a superb product is the only way to make your customers want to buy it. But there are other ways too – creating a tribe that people want to belong to, building a product that’s cheaper than your competitor’s or creating something that’s just a little bit better than the rest are all valid paths to take.

It’s less common for software companies to succeed in fulfilling the first step – since it’s so rare they even try – and fail the second, but one notable example is Windows Vista which people refused to buy despite near ubiquitous advertising. Everybody has their pet reasons as to why this was: mine include confused messaging, impossible to understand bundling and bewildering advertising.

So how do you reach your target audience?

There are many ways, but none of them is the single truth. If your target market is highly internally connected, and if your product is worth talking about, then sometimes you can reach a few key people inside the group and they will spread the word for you, much like a well evolved virus can spread like wildfire through a dense population. But don’t forget you need the second link in the chain too, which is ever so easy to do.

But that’s a hard trick to pull off. If your idea spreads too quickly, or too slowly, or is too sticky, or not sticky enough, if your market is too large, or too small, or too interconnected, or not interconnected enough, then it will flash through the population and burn out (the Hampster Dance) or simply fade away (think Snakes on a Plane).

If your market has no internal connections, or if you have a product that people are unlikely to talk about, then you need to reach people on your own, using traditional broadcast marketing such as advertising, product reviews and the more modern tools of blogging, Twitter and Google adwords.

Of course, the most likely scenario is that you need to do both. The characteristics of your product and market are probably such that you can’t just light the kindling and step back to watch as the market catches fire and blazes, but neither will you need to individually light every single twig.

The odds are that getting your fire going will be a long, hard slog requiring careful and regular stoking over many weeks, months and years.

Agree or disagree with my views on marketing? Post here.

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Greasing the wheels for persuasion

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A few weeks ago I gave a very short speech at the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs society. It bombed. As I was speaking, all I could see was boredom on the ocean of passive faces in the audience.

I thought I had done everything right. I had solid content, I had what I thought was an interesting angle, and I’d prepared well. So why did it go down so badly?

At the time, I blamed Doug Richard. He’d spoken before me. My dull talk was lost in the afterimage of his irritatingly brilliant, insightful, captivating, amusing and apparently impromptu speech. The bastard.

But maybe my talk wasn’t so dull after all.

Jennifer Aaker just tweeted about this article on the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

The headline is that if you want your message to stand out, make sure it follows something dull. This is an extraordinary finding:

You can change the impact of your message without altering a single word or pixel.

If your message follows one from a source that isn’t credible, your message will be more credible.

If it follows a message with little information, yours will seem to contain more information.

Of course, the opposite holds true too. I’m now reassured that my talk wasn’t intrinsically dull – that was just an illusion in the minds of the audience.

This opens up intriguing possibilties for marketing too:

Want somebody to reply to your marketing e-mail? Send out a tedious, poorly written e-mail about gardening equipment five minutes earlier.

Want somebody to click on your banner ad? Insert a dull, dummy one for rod draining as the first frame.

And so on. Got any better ideas of how to apply psychology to marketing? Post here …

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Hot or Not, Part Deux

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Today’s guest post is by Simon Galbraith. Simon is co-founder and joint CEO of Red Gate Software.

I’ve been a long-time believer that, correctly chosen, professional photography is a key element in marketing. I’ve backed this belief with the money of my company and have approved countless campaigns that involve professionally taken photographs.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about an experiment where four of us (including two world experts in marketing) guessed how two photos of me posted under aliases on hotornot.com would be ranked. I also asked readers of this blog to comment on how they thought the rankings would turn out.  As expected almost everyone thought the professionally taken photo would score higher.  The only differences were the actual numbers.
Here are the hotornot results based on the professionally taken photo of “Jeremy” (left), and the point-and-click amateur photograph of “Aden” (right). Click on the images to view larger versions.

Surprise! The professionally taken photograph scored substantially lower (8.1, 79%) than the amateur photo (8.7, 86%), both in absolute terms and in the percentage ranking of attractiveness.

I’ve a quick confession to make: had the professional photograph scored higher than the amateur photograph, I would have immediately stopped thinking about this issue and have considered my case totally proven. But when the results belied a premise I’ve supported with huge sums of money, I was compelled to find a way to prove the experiment wrong; to start looking at the sample size, the details of the photo and so on.

Hotornot is a compelling site and it has a whole heap of great features enabling people to show increasing levels of interest that might ultimately lead to a relationship. I thought I might be able to use some of the more anecdotal data on hotornot to demonstrate that although the score for professionally photographed Jeremy was lower, it actually was better by some other measure.

Although less statistically rigorous, the results from my further study were the same. Aden has had one woman approach him to meet, whereas Jeremy hasn’t had that honor. Aden has been “favorited” twice by women, compared to Jeremy’s one solitary bit of interest. In every way I could think of to analyze it, Jeremy did worse than Aden.

Looking at the outliers in the histogram is interesting. Aden is more polarizing – more women ranked him at the extreme ends of the scale.  This might be valuable from a marketing point of view – perhaps people who are prone to polarization are more likely to take notice and act (another theory I’m now propounding that I need to prove).

I asked the opinion of some experts who work for the best marketers in the world, and their opinion was worthless compared to an experiment that took less than an hour to set up and cost me nothing. Given the eye-popping sums I’ve spent so far on marketing with professional photographs, it seems crazy that I haven’t tested this before. I’m still not sure that I want to use amateurish photos in our marketing, but now I have to admit that my past decisions have been based on blind prejudice rather than wise insight. It leads me to wonder: how many other of my opinions are as fact-free as my views on professionally taken photographs?

On a personal note, I’m amazed and flattered that I scored so much better than when I was a shy 16-year-old, but I suspect that might come down to the rather unusual way that hotornot averages the numbers in the histograms rather than a change in my attractiveness.  But, in this case, it might not be worth analyzing too closely.

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What do Seth Godin, a thug and a serial killer have in common?

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In I.D., Philip Davis’s 1995 film, Reece Dinsdale plays John, one of four undercover policemen sent to infiltrate a group of football hooligans at the fictional Shadwell Football Club. As John starts drinking, fighting and copying the behaviour of the thugs he is monitoring, he slowly becomes one of them.In the final scene, we see him at a neo-Nazi march.

In Dexter, Michael C. Hall plays a serial killer who hides his true identity. To fit in with society, he learns to fake the emotions that he lacks but others have. Towards the end of the second series – series 3 hasn’t aired in the UK yet – Dexter is showing signs of developing the feelings he has long been feigning.

But what has this got to do with Seth Godin?

A few weeks ago, I was at Seth’s talk in London. Somebody from the audience asked Seth how he became the person he now is.

Seth replied (and I’m paraphrasing here – Seth was more eloquent than this – but I think I’ve caught the gist):

“When I started out, I had this idea of ‘Seth Godin’, the person I wanted to be. This person had certain standards, and would behave in certain ways. He was ultra-ethical and would do nothing to contradict the principles of permission marketing. Whenever I was faced by a tricky question, I asked myself “what would ‘Seth Godin’ do”. And, over time, I became the person I wanted to be.”

I’d like to make one point, and ask one question.

Firstly, rather than asking “What would Bill Gates do?” to gain perspective when faced by a difficult problem, you can ask what the hypothetical you – the person you aspire to be – would do.

Secondly, if you consistently do that, will you, over time, become the person that you want to be, as Seth has? Or will you just be a fraud whose actions betray your essence?

Post here …

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Projects from hell - chill or scream?

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In June last year, at Tech Ed in Orlando, Red Gate announced that we'd soon be launching an archiving tool for Microsoft Exchange. The beta was weeks away, and we'd release a final version by November. But the signs were already bad - the team was hitting problems and deadlines were whizzing past. The target release date hurpled relentlessly from November to December, then to January and then beyond. And although the team worked as hard and fast as Achilles himself, and the gap narrowed, it seemed they would never catch it. Zeno would have been proud.

It's a reminder of how even the best teams (and the team working on this is awesome), can get bogged down. But there's a bright side. We're not as bad as some people, and although I shouldn't revel in other people's mistakes, sometimes it can be reassuring.

Legend has it that in 1966 Marvin Minsky - a man who Isaac Asimov described as one of only two people cleverer than himself - assigned Gerald Sussman, an undergraduate, the task of solving computer vision. As a summer project. Forty years on and, although some astonishing advances have been made, the problem remains unsolved.

In 1960, Ted Nelson founded Project Xanadu, software that would allow people to cross-reference and version the world's information. In 2007, Project Xanadu released version 1.0 of XanaduSpace.

On 28th April 1997, 3D Realms announced the upcoming release of Duke Nukem Forever. It still hasn't shipped. According to the web site, it will be released "when it's done".

No matter how competent - nay, brilliant - you are, and no matter how hard you try, things go wrong. What defines you is how you react. Do you bang the table, shout "THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE" and force the team to ship something, anything? Or do you say hey, shit happens, c'est la vie, it'll be ready when it's ready? Of course, either of these actions can be appropriate in the right circumstances, but how do you make sure you're not screaming when you should be chilling, and chilling when you should be screaming? And when is something more measured appropriate? Post here.

And what's the worst project you've ever been on? Post here.

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P.S. We're currently hoping to get the product shipped by Tech Ed 2009 and have even got a pre-release build out. Try it out and you can win a free pass to Tech Ed.

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